Systems where advertisers fax advertisements to a company's fax machine are expensive to operate. These systems require the usage of a public telephone network and the advertiser who is delivering the message must pay for usage on the network. These fax advertising systems are also not very affective at reaching someone who is willing to read the advertisement. The recipient of unwanted faxes receives marketing information that they have not asked for. Unwanted faxes are likely to be discarded without being read. Moreover, unwanted faxes can keep the fax line busy and any received faxes also cost the recipient company in consumables such as paper and ink.
Land mail or direct distribution based advertising systems are also expensive to advertisers because the advertiser must pay for postage. Many times the advertising material is discarded before being read.
Both of the above-mentioned systems also suffer from the loss of a target audience; unwanted facsimiles and unwanted mail are typically easy to distinguish from other communications and are therefore often discarded without the advertisement ever being read. Another problem with the above-mentioned methods is that both cause irritation to the recipients because filtering desired communications from undesired communications takes time, which can cause the intended message from the advertiser to the recipient to turn negative in nature.